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Future features

This post is the first of the brand new category “Future
features”. We will illustrate some of the features that will
be introduced in new blueBill Mobile versions and that are in an
advanced development stage. Before talking about the first, we'd
like to spend a few words to describe how the release process of
blueBill Mobile is structured.

First, have a look at the version number, which is composed by
three parts: x.y.z. The first number is still zero, which means
that the application is young and missing some aspects of the
Quality Assurance. Every new release is made available only after
it has been used for a couple of days on the field; but we are
preparing a program of automated tests, that will also run on
multiple emulated devices, to make the process quicker, also
considering the future where there will be much more functions to
test. When the automated tests will be ready, we will move to a
1.y.z. schema. The second digit increases (e.g. from 0.10.0 to
0.11.0) every time there are substantially new features. The third
number increases for minor releases, where typically we're just
fixing some bugs.

In the first month of life we have roughly published a release per
week. Now that the application sounds more stable, we're planning
of making a release per month, more or less (unless users warn us
of urgent defects to fix). For advanced users, we will make it
possible to install intermediate “hot” versions of the
application, in case they want to try out new stuff that is not
ready for use.

And now, what's coming? One of the thing that should be available
for 0.12.0 is the capability of attaching a KML
file to reports. In this way, geotagged observations can be shared
and immediately opened with Google Earth (or other equivalent
software). Importing these files under Google Earth can be a very
simple but effective way to archive daily observations.

Generally speaking, one of the aims of blueBill Mobile is to
enable people to manage their data as they like more, and to
eventually post them to online databases, so further ways to export
data will be available in future. Any suggestion in this area is welcome.